Tuesday, June 25, 2013

The Meat

As I ranted at some length in my
review of book one of this two-volume collection of LeGuin's short stories,
anthologies are suspect for all sorts of reasons, and when I read this volume,
I discovered yet another, one moreover that's a bit of a paradox: volume two
is, more or less, consistently excellent in the quality of its stories. How is
this paradoxically a problem with anthologies, you ask? Why, because volume one
was considerably more uneven, with a few truly brilliant stories dimmed just a
bit by those surrounding them (mediocrity by association?), while Outer Space, Inner Lands is (just?) very
good from start to finish. In other words, volume two had moments of sheer
brilliance which stood in sometimes stark relief to other rather ho-hum stories
in the collection, whereas volume two has no ho-humitude...but also, arguably,
no such stand-out moments either.

On the other hand, it
would be remiss of me to complain about the fact that volume two was so
consistently good. And there are some stories I personally found more appealing
than others. For instance, there was "Semley's Necklace," which
LeGuin, in her forceful and witty introduction (which while an essay is in some
ways really almost a short story in itself, and a good one at that) somewhat
reluctantly concedes could be labeled 'science fantasy'. She's quite
self-deprecating about it, essentially claiming she only wrote it because at
the time she didn't yet know any better, but she was selling herself, and the
entrancing Semley, way short with that assessment.

Artist's rendering of the eponymous ultra-valuable necklace
(one school of thought claims it may not be the original, however)

"Semley's
Necklace" shares a theme with several others in the collection, namely
speculative explorations of the wrenching sense of temporal displacement, or to
put it in more human terms, the loss of all those one loves, that would surely come
with NAFAL (no, this isn't a clever amalgamation of Raphael Nadal's name,
though it would be pretty cool if that caught on; it stands for "nearly as
fast as light") travel. We've all seen Avatar, and we accept too readily—because Cameron, the King of the
World, demands it—that it would be a simple matter to jump on a ship, get
frozen, and spend the six years or whatever in a heartbeat, and we all think
it's awesome because the people on the ship won't have aged hardly at all!
LeGuin refocuses our attention on that dreadful gap in perception...suppose you
left your parents or lover or cat or whatever back on Earth, and once your
journey was complete, you spend a few years on the planet and head right back
to Earth because you miss those loved ones you'd left behind. Bam! Dare to
imagine all that would have happened in those twelve or fifteen or twenty years,
and I think you'll see, as LeGuin certainly has, the wisdom in saying, as you
depart, "We are dead, you and I"—for even if both you and your
beloved still live at the end of that awful separation, what you were is dead, and
you cannot ever hope to recover the shattered synchronization of your lives.

LeGuin believes
that the final two stories in the collection are the finest, but I remain unconvinced
of that. They're not bad—none of these stories is less than very good—but "She
Unnames Them" is merely cute, and "Sur", in particular, was of
only mild interest. How she could choose their blandness over the fiery
challenge of, say, "The Matter of Seggri" puzzles me.
"Seggri" intrigues with its bold speculations about how a world might
develop in which female human(oid)s outnumber males 16 to 1, and its wry lack
of judgment, as though forcing all the men and women who read it to wonder with
her, "Which world is better?" Ours, with today's growing hope of
equality, not to mention deeply meaningful relationships between men and women,
overshadowed by the dismally violent record of all human history, or theirs,
with the (not necessarily?) terrible fate of the men balanced against their
apparently more or less eternally peaceful society?

Fans of Earthsea
will be intoxicated by "The Rule of Names", about a certain
critically important if minor—though by no means small-statured—character from
the first book, and the socks of William James fans (if anyone cares about him
anymore) will be blown clean off by "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".
I would count myself among the likely walkers, so to speak, but I freely admit
such a utopia would be hard for almost anyone to reject.

Ultimately, if
there is one theme running through nearly all these stories, it is that of
loss, its consequences and our painful efforts to recover, rebuild, remake
ourselves. And in a strange way, this
theme felt more immediate to me, more 'real', in this volume, rather than in
book one, where many of the stories are much more transparently about the
'real' world. LeGuin herself, in the
intro, playfully leaves it up to the reader to determine which book is which in
this two-volume series called The Unreal
and the Real...my TLDR answer is:
this **** is Real!

**** = 'book', of course.

The Math

Baseline score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for being "all good", +1 for
Selmey's tragic and incomprehensible journey and the shudders of tearful
sympathy it induced in me

Penalties: -1 for LeGuin making it crystal clear
she and I don't see eye to eye on her work, e.g., claiming that what are
probably the two least interesting/challenging stories are her favorites

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 Well and totally worth your time and attention

["8" is the new "great"! Check
out an explanation of our utterly uninflated scores here.]